Today, we hear plenty of music reusing beats, tones, words, and complete songs. Why? As new artists come out, it’s no surprise that they look to the greats for inspiration and try to reuse something that worked before.

This same concept is used when organizations and individuals try to maximize their older content. Whether it’s writing blogs, publishing eBooks and whitepapers, or creating infographics, repurposing content enables organizations to extend their content’s reach and improve SEO.

Now, there are multiple ways to repurpose content, but for this blog, I want to focus on SlideShare. More specifically, I want to focus on the relationship between SEO and Slideshare.

SlideShare 101

Slideshare, for those who are unfamiliar with the platform, is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service owned by LinkedIn. Organizations and individuals can upload presentations, infographics, documents, and videos; slide decks can then be viewed on the site itself, on hand-held devices, or embedded on other sites (to, for example, boost an existing LinkedIn profile).

The site currently has over 70 millions users and is one of the top 100 most-visited websites in the world. Users are able to ‘optimize’ uploads by using target keywords within the title, description, and tags.

When you upload to SlideShare, you reach an audience that’s interested in your content – over 80% of SlideShare’s 70 million visitors come through targeted search.

So what does that mean in terms of your SEO?

The Common Denominator Between SEO and SlideShare

Simply put, SlideShare helps to strengthen your off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO refers to the initiatives that you, your co-workers, stakeholders, and anyone else do off of your site that could affect your search rankings.

Initially, we tend to think that off-page SEO is just links (and lots of them). But in reality, it goes far beyond link building.

Off-page SEO shows Google what others think and value about your site. For example, as Neil Patel mentions, if you’ve got a lot of valuable links pointing to your pages, search engines will assume that you’ve got great content – the type that provides value for users.

The Off-Page SEO Power of SlideShare

Link Visibility

As I mentioned above, links are one important factor in determining page authority and search ranking. While the links within Slideshare presentation are nofollowed (thus no direct SEO benefits), it does enable users to gain link visibility through cross-linking.

And with Slideshare, you’re able to insert clickable links within descriptions, profile, transcriptions, and presentations. Inserting links to related blogs, videos, or other material will help further the reach of your on-page content on your off-page presentation.

Lead Generation

Lead capture is happening far beyond your site and designated landing pages. Today, with integrations and cooperation between platforms, various online forms can be used to drive your marketing funnel (as long as you can access the data).

SlideShare empowers users to utilize their presentations for off-page lead generation. Organizations can develop custom forms, attach them to and promote specific presentations, and voila: leads. It even has the ability to integrate with marketing automation software such as Marketo.

Embedding Within Blogs

As we’ve mentioned in previous blogs, content is a great way to drive brand awareness to your organization. Add in links from 3rd party sites, and your site could experience a search-ranking surge.

A similar concept appears within SlideShare. SlideShare enables viewers to copy an embed code to place within blogs, web pages, presentations, and more. When your presentation is embedded on other sites, it affects its ranking and also creates links back to your presentation from other sites.

The more sites embedding your SlideShare, the more effective these benefits become.

Social Shares

SlideShare is a social-sharing friendly platform; after all, it’s owned by LinkedIn. You’re able to link to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google+ page. The more shares your presentation has, the better it performs on SlideShare.

Now, depending on who you talk to, social impact may or may not play a large role in search rankings. Fortunately (for the sake of this blog), Moz identified page-level social metrics as one of the top 10 ranking factors that matter. This means that top performing pages appeared to have a significant flow of shared links via social, thus adding to its performance.

Final Thoughts

As SEO evolves, the way we display our content must evolve as well. Go beyond a blog post, an infographic, and a case study. Go beyond your website. Slideshare provides a simple and effective off-page SEO platform that companies within any industry can utilize.

Check out my colleague Kristen Vaughn’s blog for more ideas on how your organization can connect offline marketing to your online marketing.

Do you utilize Slideshare for off-page SEO? What other off-page SEO tactics do you engage in?

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